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Ten Stupid Things Men Do to Mess Up Their Lives,

Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives,

How Could You Do That, and

The Ten Commandments by Laura Schlessinger

Here are some of the beneficial platitudes offered by Laura Schlessinger (Surprisingly, any distortions I have made are in the direction of improvement.):

· Act despite fears, pains or other feelings. Actions are more important than emotions.

· Don’t see yourself as a victim

· Don’t blame others for your mistakes.

· Don’t make excuses.

· Courage is exhilarating.

· Don’t whine.

· Don’t seek happiness in the wrong places.

· Tolerate the discomfort of beginning.

· People dislike being informed of duties.

· Moral courage may make you unpopular.

· Big changes produce more results than many little changes.

· Everyone has bad things happen to her.

· A life without duty and courage lacks depth and purpose.

· Doing good should make you feel good.

· Doing bad should make you feel bad.

· Let trivial injustices go. Get over bad things.

· If people constantly mistreat you, bad luck is not the biggest problem.

· We damage hundreds of potential relationships. You should not constantly brood over it. Work on the relationships you should work on now.

· Don’t be weak.

· Cowardice is worse than stupidity.

· Don’t quit.

· Character matters most.

· Self-worth should come from accomplishments.

· Don’t let bad thoughts consume you.

· Fight evil.

· Have high standards for people.

Not much is wrong with these platitudes, there is, however, much wrong with these books. You can read similar ideas in a quote book much faster, without all the blather that marks the writing style found in these books. Not many individuals who are not already highly motivated will start and finish books with prose this awful. Mixed in with the slashes and exclamation points are a few good points but by the time I got through a couple dozen pages of Stupid Men I wanted to give up. Ten Commandments and Stupid Women appear to have been written over a weekend, How Could You Do That over two weekends and Stupid Men during a break at a golf outing. Nevertheless the author’s ear voyeurism—stories about about the three A’s: Abuse, adultery and abortion—appear to translate well into book melodrama. But melodrama does not equal morally right. If you need to spend three hours everyday being told not to commit adultery by a talk show host thousands of miles away, you might want to consider the possibility that there is something wrong with your motives and character. It only takes me a few minutes to figure out adultery is wrong--and without help from anyone. Many of her other ideas are repetition for already converted radio listeners.

The stupid things she mentions are so obvious—give up psycho chicks, neediness, desperation, greed, machismo, cowardice, flakiness, distractions, status, addictions, immaturity, sexual excesses, relationship evasion, parental hang-ups, hands-off parenting, being a jerk, physical aggression, emotive manipulation, marrying way down, trying to save a bad woman who is not going to change, forgiving block heads, affectionless living, expecting changes from a brick, unmarried pregnancies and wrong headed commitments.—those for whom these rules are a revelation must have spent years in a cage or its near equivalent: Mass culture.

There are some wrongs in the Ten Commandments. As Bernard Gert has pointed out, the Ten Commandments imply that slavery and coveting thy neighbor’s husband are acceptable, unless “Give your slave a day off,” somehow implies that slavery is wrong. The Commandments do not encourage beneficial action, nor do they encourage the avoidance of many evils. They encourage the narrow morality of evading a handful of evils. Some people treat them as absolute rules, which causes other evils. They are vague enough that a variety of versions have been created, which is no help either. They are an appeal to a sacred text, which is an insult to the moral autonomy of humans. And they shut off moral reasoning and the development of proper moral emotions.

Laura Schlessinger crowns Damon Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) of Jerry Maguire the morally ideal man. It is not a great sign when alleged moralists pronounce celebrity athletes the moral ideal. Gooding is Oscar worthy, but the character has more than a few huge moral flaws, which is good entertainment, but not good morality. Almost no one wants to watch a fictional character who is a paragon of virtue. But it is a bad idea to turn celebrity characters into a real life moral ideal. Judging by her selection of Tidwell, Schlessinger’s sole criterion for character is devotion to family. I can think of thousands of occupations that produce better moral results than being a football player. (If football turns boys into men, how come football players are callous pelvic missionaries and retired football players are feckless blimps? As someone I cannot remember once more or less said, “Tom Clancy—known for providing trivial, long winded, technical entertainment for lazy, trivial men who make no effort to be human—will now do more of the same as owner of the Minnesota Vikings.”)

[Irrelevant digression time:

The lead character is even worse. In typical Hollywood fashion Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) behaves as a brute, then does a last second conversion soliloquy that we are supposed to believe is lasting. Dump the bum, wistful woman. A pause and a moment of epiphany now passes for a crises of conscience and relentless efforts to make changes.

I saw An American President on the same night, a flick featuring another paragon of failed morality that most people hardly notice. President Andrew Not-Much-Of-A-Shepard (Michael Douglas) launches a nighttime missile attack against a Libyan military post and its janitorial staff because it would be the most “proportional” response. It occurs to none of the film’s groupthink geniuses that good ethics means proportionally punishing those most responsible, not the less guilty. President Shepard thinks it does not matter whether you blow up janitors or murderous dictators and generals as long as some sort of one for one exchange is going on, something we also forgot about in 1991 and numerous other times. (Trying to blow up Saddam’s Winnebago was not an adequate effort. Never mind making any sort of distinction between murderers and those trying to punish murderers. If a junta of 100 individuals murders one person all 100 deserve to be punished, not one proportional person. Nor does Shepard and his staff ever think about what sort of actions would deter future murder, an unmitigated example of not finding alternatives.) Ironically, the tone of the film tries to convince us that President Shepard is a deep and serious thinker. His type of slip-shod moral reasoning constantly occurs. In the half century after World War II when over 100 million people died in hundreds of wars not one single individual was tried, convicted and punished by an international war crimes tribunal. Is it any wonder there are so many dictators? None of which has anything to do with Schlessinger’s book, except to the extent that someone who offs Sadam and his regime is likely to be at least 1000 times the moral ideal that a football player is.]

In better parts Schlessinger argues that we flee to fantasies, that even if our fantasies came true, it would not make for a happy life. Duty, striving, and friendship make for a happy life. Yet we act as if dreams were sufficient to change physical reality, that a life of cheating and manipulation is the good life.

Psychology, she writes, focuses on excuses and self-gratification. She says neotraditional values help get us through temptation, so that long-term interests can be served. Caring and sacrifice mush be relentlessly taught and practiced until they become habits.

Much of her writing, however, is flat out wrong: “We usually know the right thing to do: Confusion comes from trying to reconcile wrong with right. Confusion is a cop out.” She is endorsing intuitionism and intolerance of uncertainty. This is scary. Most of the mass murderers in history were very "unconfused" and confident they were right. Most of the time I did what my intuitions told me I was wrong. I used to believe all kinds of baloney until better arguments "confused" me and put me on a better path. And most other people are the same way.

Judging by the venom Schlessinger directs at daycare, I get the impression that she considers daycare one of the all time great moral evils, never mind the millions of people who are murdered every year or die of malnutrition. Never mind the fact that billions of individuals on this planet have received almost no moral education. Of course, her venom does help her target audience feel morally superior for sitting at home, chomping doughnuts, watching TV, and listening to the radio.

The studies that claim 80 percent of day care is inadequate have serious flaws such as unrepresentative samples, inadequate decomposition (heredity, income, local culture, parent education level are not factored in) and isolated statistics (minor differences are represented as major). One survey suggests that 90 percent of parents are happy with the care their children get at daycare.

Research that suggests we should be alarmed because 17 percent of children in daycare are aggressive versus a much lower number for stay at home children is faulty for a number of reasons:

· Stay-at-home parents have less impulsive, less aggressive genes, which they pass on to their children.

· Parents are more likely to put aggressive children in day care because parents do not want to be with aggressive children all day everyday.

· People who use day care are more likely to be from a more aggressive cultural background.

· Children who spend almost all their time at home are unlikely to be aggressive in test situations because being around strange children is less familiar to them and diffidence is far more probable in strange social situations. They may become more aggressive after a few years in school. Seventeen percent of all school age children are aggressive. Seventeen percent may be caused by other factors or it may mean that stay at home kids become more aggressive as they get used to spending time in groups of other kids, many of whom are not their friends.

· Most important, parents, daycare workers and others in our culture are trained to give the wrong types of attention and discipline to children. Children are rewarded with attention for misbehaving. I read somewhere that only one percent of children in French daycare are aggressive.

Here is a strange thought: Maybe ultra conservatives got it backward. Since learning to read and write is extremely important, and since decent parents have little influence on early childhood development, maybe toddlers are better off in daycare than elementary age kids are in elementary school. Dedicated homeschoolers may be doing far more for their kids than the parents who think they are morally superior because they stay home with their kids for the first five years.

Here are a more accurate ten commandments that ultra conservatives actually adhere to:

· Economics is not a moral issue, except for the moral imperitive for policies that benefit ultra conservatives and harm others.

· Flag burning, school prayer and similar issues are moral issues because they deflect attention from issues that conservatives need not address.

· No matter the problem, the intelligentsia are important causes or the most important causes.

· Any level of consumerism is acceptable, except when it is spent on things that ultraconservatives do not spend money on.

· Totalitarian markets create only good things or create good things in such high probabilities that exceptions can safely be ignored.

· Criticizing consumerism and power markets is dispiriting and anti-American. Renouncing your citizenship to escape taxes and build mansions in tax havens is not anti-American but a brave act of courage and citizenship that sends a moral message to the government and other Americans.

· Tax cuts for the rich inspire the rich to work harder and build wonderful things. Tax cuts for others are anti-fairness, anti-equality, merely pandering, a form of dependency, and encourage the non-rich to work less, and the nonrich working less is bad not because the non-rich produce much of value but because it causes social problems.

· Moral value is determined by outrage, intuition and tradition, not harm, benefit, rights, and duties. Morality is a source of great purpose and emotional depth, except when it involves detailed arguments or calculations of utility, in which case it is cold and vulgar because it is boring and might conflict with intuitions and common nonsense. Consequentialist considerations are outweighed by appeals to arbitrary ultra conservative rules. Any rules that do not benefit conservatives do not exist or carry no weight because they violate consequentialism or conservative rules.

· Given choices among money, religion, amusement, reason, humanitarianism and family values, choose money, religion and amusement. Too hell with reason, humanitarianism and family values.

· Feeling strongly about something is a good reason to screw people, except if etiquette is at stake or non-ultra conservative is doing the screwing.

One could do worse than adopting the norms on the back cover of Ten Stupid Men and one could do a whole lot better. It is not a good sign when the best part of a book is its back cover--or the table of contents in the case of Stupid Women. Not recommend times four. Book review article by J.T. Fournier.

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